I have to restart 3 times before I get a console that I can log into. I get a fsck run right away that is rather annoying with a reboot. Then I get a kernel panic so I restart. Then it works all of a sudden. I'm pretty sure this has to do the the date being set to 1970. I tried adding -localtime to the qemu command line parameters but that didn't seem to fix it really. I imagine this won't happen on the real hardware.

Once I login I run the following:

date -s "05/13/2008" #set to the current date

apt-get install ntpdate #need to check if this adds it into cron

tzselect #follow the prompts

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

apt-get install less #I can't get along with out it

apt-get install icewm

apt-get install firefox

apt-get xterm

I've been trying various packages. icewm - pretty ugly at the moment, but it launches just fine. Firefox - doesn't launch. It nails the cpu for a while and then nothing happens. I think maybe there isn't enough memory perhaps? Seems to me that I need to set qemu to 64mb RAM and setup a swap file to make things more similar to my c3000. xterm - it works fine.

What is everyone else running? What's working? What's not? I'm so stoked about this! I hope I can find more time tomorrow to mess around and get a few more things working. I think I'm going to setup a bzr repository of my tarball so I can recover from the massively huge mistakes I'll be making over the next few weeks .

So I've been playing around a little bit more. I've made a whole mess of little scripts to handle creating the virtual qemu drive and untar the rootfs back into it. I also created a script to generate a new tarball when I want. This has made my horrible mistakes... er I mean my testing go much smoother.

I've made a few minor changes to Cortez suggestions. I added the -localtime and the -startdate now settings. This sets the date and time for me immediately and I don't have to worry about remembering the set anything with the date command after I startup.

When I'm working on my PC, the /etc/init.d/keymap file sets the keyboard to use the zaurus keymap. That drives me nuts so I disable that by moving the file out of /etc/init.d. This is temporary and before I create a new rootfs I put it back so the Zaurus has the right keyboard layout.

I started messing around with getting my Ambicom wireless card working. It seemed to load the drivers fine. However, for some reason when I ran ifup wlan0, the dhcp client was not working properly. I kept getting a "execve (/lib/dhcp3-client/call-dhclient-script, …): Permission denied" error.

After a quick google search someone else with the same issue just ran "apt-get install --reinstall dhcp3-client" to fix the issue. That seemed to work for me just fine as well.